Over 1000 acres\ Lincolnshire\ 6,000 visitors

Engag­ing with the public

See­ing our event grow every year and wel­com­ing new and return­ing vis­i­tors to our farm is so reward­ing. It is won­der­ful to watch fam­i­lies spend the day togeth­er in a rur­al set­ting and engage with our team. Our farm machin­ery dis­play is always one of our most pop­u­lar attrac­tions and it is so enjoy­able to explain in detail to vis­i­tors how we use the machines to help grow crops and how the crops are used. Many peo­ple are unaware of their uses, such as our maize crop is used in our anaer­o­bic digester which then pro­vides our elec­tric and heat for the farm. In return we are always reward­ed with such amaz­ing pho­tos and feed­back from our vis­i­tors who have enjoyed the day.

Man­ag­ing large vis­i­tor num­bers using the tick­et­ing service

We were delight­ed with the free online tick­et­ing ser­vice that LEAF offered to us in 2018 – which uses the Try­book­ing sys­tem. It helped us to man­age vis­i­tor num­bers and the flow of vis­i­tors through­out the day. It was also fas­ci­nat­ing to see how far peo­ple trav­elled to come to our event. 

We split the tick­ets into 4 cat­e­gories — under 2’s, 2 – 11 years, 12 – 18 years and adult (over 18) — which helped us plan the event bet­ter in terms of age-relat­ed activ­i­ties and attrac­tions. We offered a total of 4,500 tick­ets online which were ful­ly booked 3 weeks pri­or to the event. We then pro­mot­ed to oth­er cus­tomers that if they didn’t have a tick­et they need­ed to arrive after 1pm so we could man­age the car park.

The main advan­tage of using this tick­et­ing ser­vice was that we could send all the event infor­ma­tion direct­ly to the vis­i­tor. In pre­vi­ous years, we have had an open gate approach and when we reached 5,000 vis­i­tors in 2017, it was dif­fi­cult to ensure that they were aware of our facil­i­ties, event sched­ule, first aid and safe­ty infor­ma­tion such as hand­wash­ing etc. We used to hand out leaflets to every car with a site map and infor­ma­tion which was an addi­tion­al cost to cov­er. By send­ing this infor­ma­tion through the online tick­et­ing ser­vice or direct­ing peo­ple to our own web­site with an FAQ sec­tion, we print­ed few­er leaflets and felt that cus­tomers were more aware of where to go on site on arrival.

Our car park­ing field will accom­mo­date 1,000 cars and in pre­vi­ous years groups of vis­i­tors would dri­ve sep­a­rate­ly and meet up here. By send­ing pre-event emails to every­one we high­light­ed this and encour­aged peo­ple to car share so we could wel­come more peo­ple. It worked as we were able to accom­mo­date 6,000 vis­i­tors in 2018.

We will def­i­nite­ly use the online tick­et­ing ser­vice again this year! I don’t think that we could host an Open Farm Sun­day with­out it now as we need to con­trol the vis­i­tor numbers.

This year we are going to adver­tise it as a ​‘reg­is­ter­ing ser­vice’ as we were unable to scan the tick­ets if peo­ple had them on their phone or print­ed out. Due to the num­bers it was unre­al­is­tic to have a print­out of tick­ethold­ers to mark off at the gate. 

We are going to give our farm shop loy­al­ty card hold­ers exclu­sive access for the first week of release. The sec­ond week we’ll pro­mote our event to our cus­tomers on our farm shop till receipt, before pro­mot­ing it on gen­er­al release on our web­site and social media channels.

How we pro­mote our event

• e‑marketing via Mailchimp 
• event newslet­ter to Uncle Henry’s customers 
• Web­site
• Press release (local and national) 
• Local radio
• Vil­lage newsletters 
• Fly­ers in local schools — I usu­al­ly call the school and ask per­mis­sion then pro­vide leaflets for each class size 
• Face­book
• Twit­ter
• Insta­gram
• Stall­hold­ers that attend — they pro­mote the event through posters or social media 
• Local busi­ness­es (fly­ers) includ­ing the Lin­colnshire Co-op 

Helpers

We are very for­tu­nate to have a great team here at Uncle Henry’s but we wouldn’t be able to run the event with­out vol­un­teers. We have assis­tance from our local rotary club, NFU, rur­al char­i­ties, arable staff, local farm­ing busi­ness­es, young farm­ers club and cadets. A lot of our vol­un­teers have helped us for many years, even so we always do a walk-through of the event the day before and again on the morn­ing before vis­i­tors arrive on site. We also use walkie talkies to answer any queries immediately. 

Activ­i­ties

We split our site into dif­fer­ent zones and pro­vide vis­i­tors with a site map. The zones are: 

• Farm Zone
• Ani­mal Zone 
• Mar­ket Zone 
• Eat Street
• Main Ring Field 

Last year in our sta­t­ic Farm Machin­ery dis­play we had our Shire Hors­es, vin­tage trac­tors and then mod­ern machin­ery which was a fan­tas­tic visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of how farm­ing has devel­oped over the past 100 years.

Uncle Henry’s is part of a fam­i­ly farm­ing mixed arable and live­stock busi­ness, owned by Steve and Meryl Ward. Their three chil­dren Emma, Gra­ham and Sam are all now also involved in the busi­ness. Our trac­tor and trail­er rides are always pop­u­lar and we take vis­i­tors on a tour of the farm and explain that our main farm­ing enter­prise is arable farm­ing and this is looked after by Steve and Sam. We grow cere­al crops (wheat and bar­ley), oil seed rape and pota­toes. We also have our own pig herd which Meryl looks after. Emma man­ages the farm shop and café along­side Gra­ham who looks after butch­ery and exter­nal whole­sale cus­tomers. Emma, Gra­ham and Sam are the fifth gen­er­a­tion to live and work at the fam­i­ly farm.

The farm runs an inte­grat­ed sys­tem where the cere­al crops on the farm are used to pro­vide feed for the pigs, the straw is used as bed­ding and any manure pro­duced is returned to the land to reduce our reliance on arti­fi­cial fer­tilis­ers. High wel­fare pig pro­duc­tion and envi­ron­men­tal stew­ard­ship are impor­tant parts of the farm­ing busi­ness. The trac­tor ride takes vis­i­tors along­side our pig fin­ish­ing unit and anaer­o­bic digester so we can explain that side of our sto­ry to them. 

Our farm is part of the high­er-lev­el envi­ron­men­tal stew­ard­ship scheme which means that the busi­ness has com­mit­ted to main­tain exist­ing envi­ron­men­tal fea­tures includ­ing hedgerows, per­ma­nent pas­ture pro­tect­ing a rare orchid species, and has cre­at­ed new fea­tures includ­ing floris­ti­cal­ly enhanced mar­gins, new ponds and increased pub­lic access. Our local bee­keep­er Bob Mould keeps his bee­hives on our farm which helps our local pol­li­na­tion. Bob jars the hon­ey which we then sell in the farm shop. 

Resources

We order every­thing pos­si­ble due to hav­ing so many vis­i­tors so any resources that we can pro­vide to them is fan­tas­tic. The cress seeds were a fan­tas­tic resource and we encour­aged vis­i­tors to plant their own egg head using an egg shell at our free seed plant­i­ng stand. The stick­ers are giv­en to every child that enjoys a trac­tor and trail­er ride and the work­sheets are hand­ed out in the farm zone. We are also sup­port­ed by our local NFU branch who very kind­ly bring any spare resources with them on the day and hand them out to vis­i­tors as they leave the car park. If we have any­thing left after the event it does not go to waste as we hand them out to the 30 free school vis­its that we host over the year. 

Ques­tions from visitors

We get asked a lot of things that we might find strange but in fact, it’s quite enlight­en­ing to realise that some vis­i­tors don’t know how their food is grown by farm­ers. A lot of chil­dren espe­cial­ly don’t know that chips come from pota­toes, or sausages from pigs. Being able to take the time to teach vis­i­tors some­thing new or answer ques­tions they have is incred­i­bly rewarding. 

Health and safety

I think the health and safe­ty is noth­ing to be fear­ful of, the risk assess­ment guide and infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by LEAF is fan­tas­tic and made me aware of areas that I hadn’t con­sid­ered. I send our risk assess­ment to our insur­er who also checks over the doc­u­ment for me and advis­es on any poten­tial issues. I am for­tu­nate that we are sup­port­ed by our local LIVES group and Hum­ber­side Fire & Res­cue so I can dis­cuss any con­cerns with them pri­or to the event tak­ing place. We always have a debrief after the event and I try to pho­to­graph any areas that might be of con­cern, so it is eas­i­er to cor­rect them for next year. 

Biggest wor­ry

That we don’t meet vis­i­tor expec­ta­tions or pro­vide them with enough infor­ma­tion about the event. As the vis­i­tor num­bers have increased, we have had a few issues that have been high­light­ed such as toi­let loca­tions and a full car park but we always aim to address any issues before the next event takes place.

Finances

We raise mon­ey for local char­i­ties, Rotary Club, Macmil­lan, LIVES, Lincs and Notts Air Ambu­lance and our local church who charge for face paint­ing on the day. This year we raised over £7,000.